‘Labor is the most glorious’ : Chronotopic linguistic landscaping and the making of working class identities

Abstract

This paper draws on the notion of chronotope to investigate linguistic landscape (LL) signs of an urban migrant community on the out skirts of Beijing. Internal rural migrant workers have relocated to urban centers for labor-intensive jobs on a massive scale since the 1980s when China underwent rapid economic changes. While many migrant workers are pre-occupied with their jobs, some have built a community center to record their migrant histories, to voice their concerns as a marginalized social group and to construct their identity as legitimate workers. This paper argues that the LL signs of this migrant community center invoke multiple chronotopes and need to be understood in complex timespace frames. The analyses of three examples show that the migrant workers use painting and other creative ways of representation in public space to address their economic position and social identification in a globalizing China.